At 30, World Wide Web ‘not the web we wanted,’ inventor says

At its ripe old age of 30 and with half the globe using it, the World Wide Web is facing growing pains with issues like hate speech, privacy concerns and state-sponsored hacking, its creator says.

Tim Berners-Lee joined a celebration Tuesday of the Web and reminisced about where he invented it — at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research — beginning with a proposal published on March 12, 1989.

The 63-year-old Englishman is calling on governments, companies and citizens to work together, and wants the web to become more accessible to those who aren’t online.

Speaking at a “Web@30” conference, Berners-Lee acknowledged that for those who are online, “the web is not the web we wanted in every respect.”

In 1990, I coded up the foundational technologies for the World Wide Web.